Was it a hack or a leak? (2)

Last week I noted Patrick Lawrence’s article on the the purported hack of the DNC email by the Russians in the run-up to last year’s election. Lawrence reported on the analysis presented by former intelligence officials who assert it was something else entirely. Lawrence’s article was posted under the heading “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.” Lawrence’s article includes relevant links.

The analysis has been presented by a group of former American intelligence officers. The group — Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — was founded in 2003 and now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence.

In his article Lawrence noted that “[t]he chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch.”

The analysis seems so far not to have broken out beyond a small circle of friends. Last night Tucker Carlson invited Binney on to discuss it (video below). The analysis is over my head. As I said last week, I can only say that it is interesting if true and that the discussion should extend beyond a small circle of friends.